Starting a Blog: Week 4

Hello my dear readers! I’m sorry this post is a few days late. But, I had a very busy weekend which I explain below so I hope you can be forgiving! For those who don’t know I decided that I wanted to chronicle my experience of starting a blog. The intent is so others can learn what it takes to start a blog, learn from my mistakes throughout the process, and to hopefully provide some humor and enjoyment to your day. If you want to learn how to start a blog, I created a tutorial on how to do so through Bluehost so be sure to check it out!

I’ve decided these weekly updates will be posted once a week (most likely Saturday) and will consist of 5 categories.

Blog posts that I published

Personal Accomplishments

Extra Income I earned

Goals I accomplished during the week

Goals for Next Week

I know this will be very similar to my monthly income reports, but I think having weekly and monthly goals are going to help me stay focused and break my bigger goals down into smaller ones. This should help me in accomplishing my monthly goals, but also allow me to celebrate additional small successes that may happen throughout each week.

So this is the end of week 4 of the life of my beloved blog. I have stuck with this crazy process for one whole month! I am very proud of what I have accomplished so far and what I hope to accomplish in the future!

Blog Posts:

I was able to successfully stick with my content schedule and posted 3 blog posts this past week!

I knew this week was going to be crazy due to my husband graduating from college and our first year wedding anniversary so I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to post all three, but I made it happen and I am very proud! Now, this weekly update was not posted during the weekend, but honestly it’s okay to spend time enjoying life along the way right? Right!

Personal Accomplishments:

I accomplished so much this week!

My husband graduated from college with his Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice! He already has a fantastic job so we are hoping this degree will just help him move forward in his career. He was also already accepted to graduate school, but we haven’t decided if and when he is going to pursue this. I know this is more of his accomplishment, but he’s my husband. It is an honor and a privilege to see this man I love accomplish something that has taken him 13 years to accomplish.

I made a new recipe this week! Chicken Pot Pie Casserole! It was actually really good and my husband really liked it which is a huge bonus since he doesn’t really care too much for home-made meals. (He is a chicken, pizza, and burgers kind of guy).

I spent about 4 hours making a debt repayment plan based on our new combined base salary. It was really exciting to see that using the snowball method, we could be debt free in 5 ½ years. Now we will most likely be buying a house in between now and then so this will change, but this doesn’t even include any commission I earn, any extra income from my side jobs, business income, or any increase in salary we may experience over the next few years. It’s really exciting in my book! I plan on researching other methods of paying down debt to help decrease the amount of time it will take us.

I called my student loan provider and was able to lower my monthly payment! One of my student loans has been in deferment for the past 2 years. This is not something I would recommend but it did help us out when we didn’t have the money to pay this. I just wish we had focused on paying down a different loan while we weren’t paying this. Oh well, I’m still excited I confronted my worry over these loans and I am going to conquer them.

I was able to spend time with both my husband and I’s families this weekend and planned a successful graduation celebration party! It was really great to have both sides of our family come together and spend time supporting my husband and I in this manner. It was also really fun to play a new board game Splendor with everyone!

Extra Income:

Surveys: I cashed out my first payment from American Consumer Opinion. My first check should come in about 6-8 weeks and will be for $10.15! This first check is small, but I really wanted to see my first payment from doing these surveys to help me stay motivated. My current goal is to be making $20 each month from surveys.

Mystery Shopping: I received my first check for being a mystery shopper! Now it’s only $3.00 but I am so excited that I am going to be bringing in a good bit of extra income from doing this! I completed 6 mystery shops this week! I would have completed more but my husband is graduating this week so I didn’t want to feel overwhelmed. The amount I earned from mystery shopping this past week was $21.00! There weren’t many big shops available this week so I focused on easy ones that paid $3 or $4 a pop. Still, that’s $21.00 I didn’t have before and this brings my mystery shop total so far to $48.00 since I completed my first shop April 28th.

This Week’s Goals:

(I decided that each week I will set 10 small goals for my blog. All of them should be helping me reach my bigger goals that I set each month.)

Publish 3 posts- Pass! I was able to stick to my content schedule and posted all three of my scheduled posts that I mentioned above.

Find 1 new affiliate partner through shareasale-Fail. I did not focus any time on this during this past week.

Join 5 group Pinterest boards- Fail. I did find several group boards I plan on joining, but currently I am only a member of one group board. I plan on joining other boards this week.

Fix one design issue on my blog (spacing and formatting issues in my posts) – Fail! I truly did not have time to dedicate to working on this goal this week. It is still a goal, but I feel like since this goal is a bit harder than the others I am somewhat avoiding it. I will be working on correcting this in the future.

Gain 10 followers on Twitter– I now have 11 people following my business Twitter account! I haven’t been putting a lot of effort into this goal, mostly because I have never used Twitter. However, I plan to continue to grow this number during the next few weeks.

Have 10 people like my blog’s Facebook page– I totally blew this goal away! I have 57 likes on my business Facebook page. It’s still a work in progress, but I am very proud of this number!

Earn $20 in extra income- I definitely did this thanks to mystery shopping! I was able to earn $21.00 so I overachieved this past week!

Create a business plan (I actually wrote down some ideas for my business plan but I need to create a schedule for this)

Network with 3 new bloggers

Fix one design issue on my blog

Work on my tumblr page

I am continuing to really love my blog! It means so much to me that I am creating something that matters. I hope that I am inspiring you to pursue your dreams and to live your life as fully as possible! Share below what you have been doing this week to meet your blogging and personal goals!

I’m in the UK so I guess they will be different to yours 🙂 I always think the US ones pay better from what I see people posting! There was an amazing one the other day but I didn’t get to it in time boo!

I think the ones you’ve been seeing in the US probably include reimbursement for eating out. The shops in my area at least involving food do not pay you, they just reimburse you up to a certain extent.